Build skills that transfer between career paths

  • Asked to choose between consulting and advancing within an employer, Pocock focuses on transferable agent skills that can support either path. 12:09 12:27
  • He sees teaching and adoption support as opportunities because organizations he speaks with struggle to adopt AI. He also acknowledges ethical concerns rather than treating adoption as uncontroversial. 10:33 11:01
  • Other possibilities he names include applications that embed AI and helping companies improve their existing systems. These are suggested opportunities, not evidence of guaranteed business demand. 11:21

The difficult skills

  • Decide which outputs to trust and how to organize agents. Stronger models do not automatically remove the learning curve. 12:52 13:10
  • Control the information agents receive, including its format and data structures. 13:10
  • Turn human processes into instructions agents can follow, then make those instructions reusable. 13:30
  • Design ways to verify the work. Pocock argues that coding and mathematical proofs offer clearer verification than much everyday knowledge work. 13:30

Where Pocock sees the strongest opportunity

  • Adapt agents to an organization's particular knowledge-work processes. He says finding a workable process for his own daily work took many attempts and still requires improvement. This difficulty is why he sees organizational process design as valuable. 14:07 14:40